This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art, which may be related to various aspects of the present invention that are described below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present invention. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
Television broadcast systems throughout the world have migrated from the delivery of analog audio and video signals to modern digital communications systems. For example, in the United States, the Advanced Television Standards Committee (ATSC) has developed a standard called “ATSC Standard: Digital Television Standard A/53” (the A53 standard). The A53 standard defines how data for digital television broadcasts should be encoded and decoded. In addition, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has allocated portions of the electromagnetic spectrum for television broadcasts. The FCC assigns a contiguous 6 MHz channel within the allocated portion to a broadcaster for transmission of terrestrial (i.e., not cable or satellite) digital television broadcasts. Each 6 MHz channel has a channel capacity of approximately 19 Mb/second based on the encoding and modulation format in the A53 standard. Furthermore, the FCC has mandated that transmissions of terrestrial digital television data through the 6 MHz channel must comply with the A53 standard.
Digital broadcast signal transmission standards, such as the A53 standard, define how source data (e.g., digital audio and video data) should be processed and modulated into a signal that is transmitted through the channel. The processing adds redundant information to the source data so that a receiver that receives the signal from the channel may recover the source data, even if the channel adds noise and multi-path interference to the transmitted signal. The redundant information added to the source data reduces the effective data rate at which the source data is transmitted but increases the potential for successful recovery of the source data from the transmitted signal.
The A53 standard development process was focused on high definition television (HDTV) and fixed reception. The system was designed to maximize video bit rate for the large high resolution television screens that were already beginning to enter the market. Transmissions broadcast under the ATSC A/53 standard, or legacy encoding and transmission standard, present difficulties for mobile receivers.
Recognizing this fact, in 2007, the ATSC announced the launch of a process to develop a standard that would enable broadcasters to deliver television content and data to mobile and handheld devices via their digital broadcast signal. Changes to the legacy transmission standard include an additional encoding scheme to introduce further data redundancy. The additional encoding has been adapted to better perform with advanced receivers in mobile, handheld and pedestrian devices while still remaining backward compatible with the legacy A53 standard. The proposed changes also allow operation of existing ATSC services in the same radio frequency (RF) channel without an adverse impact on existing receiving equipment.
However, any new encoding scheme introduced into the present A53 standard broadcast signal also introduces additional complexity into the decoding process of an ATSC M/H receiver. For instance, the addition of concatenated block coding, in addition to the trellis decoding and Reed-Solomon decoding already present for legacy operation, may significantly increase the processing time in a receiver based on known serialized input bit processing associated with iterative a-posteriori type decoders often used for block decoding. Decoding performance is often directly related to the number of iterations necessary to achieve the optimal or desired decoded output. The number of iterations, or efficiency, in the decoder will be limited by a combination of the decoder architecture and the speed that the decoder architecture can process the incoming message signal. Further, the use of large look-up tables, used to reduce decoder processing time, create inefficiencies with respect to the physical size of the decoder architecture. It is therefore desirable to improve the decoding process and decoder efficiency by developing an improved decoding architecture.